340 Responses

Actually, another one occurs. Lots of people now live in big Auckland CBD apartment buildings which provide internet service at a flat fee along with power, etc. I presume they’re using NAT. In theory the landlord companies are ISPs. In practice … good luck with that.

Its things like this that haven't been adequately thought through that really worry me about this bill. It was rushed through under urgency and it seems far from finished, vague and non specific in some areas and simply flawed in others.

It also won't catch the high download pirates because they will generally be using seedboxes and/or VPNs or TOR. The people that will end up getting the fines will be the occasional torrenters who are really not the main issue.

But now the government can hand-on-heart say to the negotiators of TPPA and other "free" trade agreements that they've ticked off most of what the American media/entertainment lobby has asked for. Why, lil McCully or Keyboy may even get a pat on the head for it. Approval from daddy: priceless.

So an ISP could, I think, comply by responding that an IP was in use by any of a whole tranche of users.

No, the IP-address you may have locally, behind your NAT (typically 192.168.0.1-255) is not the IP-address exposed to the internet (hence NAT – network address translation). That would be your NAT external address which is dynamically allocated to you by your ISP (unless you have a fixed address). So it’s not really a problem for an ISP to match an IP-address to a customer at a given date and time. They already do this if ordered by police or internal affairs, but in a manual and labour-intensive way.

Rich is talking about "carrier-grade NAT", which is where the ISP itself presents a handful of IP addresses to the rest of the tubes and carries out NAT between its customers and those IP addresses.

There are many technical fuckups in this law that could've been avoided if *gasp* proper consultation had occurred. But it didn't, so they weren't, and now it'll fall on the hapless ISPs to deal with it.Or people like me, since I'm in the process of convincing my theatre group to offer hotspot services to customers. I'm comfortable that I can secure the hotspot against unauthorised users, but there's nothing to stop authorised users from abusing the service if they're really inclined.

Interesting. But that’s unlikely to “help”. With this law all ISPs must have the ability to match the public IP-address with a customer (not necessarily the same as a user). So even if using NAT at a gateway level, the ISP must keep track of it.

There are IPSs overseas who will not log IP-addresses allocated to customers (e.g. one of my old ISPs: Bahnhof). If they don’t log they can’t know which customer had a particular IP-address at any given time.

Maybe a business opportunity for NZ – probably needs to be hosted offshore though ;-) .

I am not of conspiratorial mind, but I do think that has been an actual strategy this week.

The worst thing is that a conspiracy is unnecessary. I'm waiting for Goff's Labour to create some utterly pointless distraction through some MP throwing another tantrum even without someone pointing out that they never opposed it anyway. A millipede with OCD and a gatling gun couldn't shoot itself in the foot more often.

I think the Letters Patent and, especially, chapter one of the Cabinet Manual might be a good guide to the limit of the Governor-General's discretion over making Orders in Council.

Please forgive a newbie asking a dullard question, and I don't want to sound like someone who can't programme the VCR or anything. It's just that thanks to the good services of the stupendously rewarding Aro Video and lovely Wellington Public Library, I've never had occasion to share a file. What is in those files that people are people sharing? Is it, I don't know, copies of bloody 'Sucker Punch' or Lady Gaga songs (or whomever, Katy Perry, I don't know) or what?

So if you ask an ISP using NAT for details on an IP, they'll give you a number of users that *could* be using that IP at a given time.

It's a flaw with legislation that gets hooked up in technical details. Saying that anyone providing a communication service has to be able to provide details of the customer behind any interaction would be "better". (as in more robust, not a good idea).

Oh. Oh dear. Thank you. So this law will, generally, stop people getting for free now that which they might get from a Warehouse bargain bin for $5 in six month's time?

In practice, could this have an impact on my freedom of expression (or opportunities to express myself freely) or is this all about ensuring that I'm a compliant, meek and obedient consumer? Viscerally, I would like to be affronted by the law, but if it merely curbs people's opportunities to swap nonsense...

Apart from the obvious legal and IT flaws of the bill, it's also flawed on a practical level, in that it'll be basically impossible to police who is actually breaking the law.

For example, while a parent may own the computer and pay the connection bills, it's more likely to be their kids that d/l stuff. Yet there's no way of identifying the actual perpertrator, but the parent will be the one to wear the penalties.

There's all sorts of possible scenarios where it'll be impossible to know who did it.

In general, it's real locking the door after the horse has bolted territory, isn't it ? I'd love to know how many relatives and friends of politicians and NZFACT d/l stuff. Chances are it's many, many of them.

This bill is egregious to the nth degree. It's much like trying to clamp down on home brewers because it's taking money away from breweries.